The ubiquitous availability of broadband internet in the home along with ever-increasing computer power is driving the use of the internet for entertainment and paving the way for demanding multimedia applications delivered over the internet. This trend has created new opportunities for online collaboration, opportunities that just a few years ago were not possible for both technical and economic reasons. Among the many new types of networked entertainment genres, online musical collaboration holds great potential to overcome the limitations of conventional musical collaboration and appreciation.
For more than 50 years advances in digital technology have enabled musicians and engineers to create new ways to make and perform music. Such advances have resulted in electronic musical instruments (e.g. sound samplers, synthesizers), which offer new opportunities for musical expression and creativity. Musicians can create a musical composition without having to use a single traditional instrument. Instead, electronic musical compositions are assembled out of pre-recorded sound samples and computer generated sounds modulated with filters, then played back from a computer. Proficiency in traditional musical instruments is no longer a prerequisite for creative musical expression.
Virtual reality allows us to imagine new paradigms for musical performance and creativity, by allowing people to collaborate remotely in real-time. Feelings of co-presence (the sense that a collaborator is experiencing the same set of perceptual stimuli at the same time) are essential for this creative process to occur, which virtual worlds are perfect for delivering. However, musical collaboration in a virtual world has historically been difficult to achieve because of the need for collaborators to play their music to a common beat, something that would require near zero latency across the data network. What is needed is a system of combining musical decisions across a network that syncs all decisions to the same beat without sacrificing the user's sense of immediacy.